by Eric Baret
Life can only find the space to reveal its beauty in complete surrender, in total inability to be anything.
Recently, during a visit to Canada, in a dream, I saw myself on a flight. I was beginning to catch sight of the top of the trees and I thought to myself that we were flying a little too low. Then the trees got to the level of the window and I observed: “We are going to crash.” For a brief moment, a fear reaction came up, immediately replaced by an extraordinary curiosity: “I am finally going to know if all the absurdities I have uttered make any sense!” Then an immense joy came over me. The wing of the plane was torn off by a tree and I woke up in a trance of joy. This joy emerges when death is obvious and inevitable.
The feeling of fear is extraordinary. The fear of dogs, of loneliness, of being struck, of losing your money or your children—to each their fantasy; it's always the same fear. When I feel this fear come up, no matter what fear, and if I am available, the fear remains somatic and finds its freedom again.
There is nothing to think about, nothing to understand. You can't explain anything: you can only tell yourself stories. Sensing is very easy, very accessible; but all that you can read or think about death is only fantasy. Every tradition has created its own repertoire of absurdities. All artistic expression lives off this repertoire—that is its value: art and beauty. It is an excuse for expressing beauty, just like fear, loneliness, sadness, all these emotions which are at the source of Indian art or European music.
Death is only a word, nothing else. Everybody dresses it in their own way. When you go to sleep at night, you leave your life with joy; it is a form of death. If you regularly give in to sleep with clarity, if you let your body fall into you, the psychological fear of death can very much decrease. It will come back for a few moments in certain situations, with air turbulence above the Himalayas for instance, but as fear it cannot last.
Don't be afraid of fear. Some people jump from a bridge or from an airplane, some enter the lion's cage, all that to feel fear.
Clearly respect the fear in yourself. Feel the fear—that is practical nonduality.
Do you sometimes look at people?
There are many ways to look. You sense the environment. When you are with your favorite dog, you do not spend your time looking at him. Of course, sometimes when he passes by, you admire the way he functions. When he's behind you, you feel him, you know that he is very close. When he is in another room, he is still here. Eyesight has its limitations.
To admire a dance performance, you often close your eyes. When you look at the dancer, you are beguiled by her beauty, her movement, the perfection of her gestures, but you miss something. When you close your eyes, sound takes over and takes you much further. Then there comes a moment when you no longer even listen. When you don't look at the dance, when you don't listen to the music, a vibration remains.
Everything is here, I'm not interested in the dancer over there. In listening, I don't look and I don't listen. The concert takes place in the heart. From that emotion, we can then look over there and everything looks different.
Beyond what is seen and what is heard, the felt sense remains. You approach beauty with closed eyes. To open your eyes is a compromise.
Chapter 5
Let fear devour you
The more he believes himself lost, the happier he is; the more desperate, the stronger. And if he could know anything, it would be to never have any certainty, to constantly live in the unknown…
Madame Guyon:
Christian and Spiritual Discourses Concerning Inner Life
How can I put an end to violence?
You put an end to violence when you are no longer afraid—because violence comes from fear.
The dog attacks you out of fear. When you train fighting dogs, you don’t train them to attack, but to be afraid. When they see a certain form, a certain color, body type or gesture, no need to tell them what to do, they are scared and they attack.
When fear leaves you, violence stops. For this to happen, you’ll have to stop pretending to be a personal entity, an image which you need to defend because it is attacked by a world that doesn’t acknowledge it.
Fear generates violence. You are intolerant with those who understand life differently than you do, because their way of being challenges yours. Those who like violence disturb you, you are scared of them and, in turn, you become aggressive. When somebody beats a child in front of you, you are revolted and you want to beat up the abuser: that is violence. This doesn’t mean that you have to stay passive, but you no longer react as a function of your fears. You respond to a situation directly without reference to the past.
As long as there’s fear, there is violence. You are going to be brutal with the adult that beats the child and, as soon as you leave, he will probably be even more brutal. Wars have never put an end to violence.
Certain situations can justify a fight. If a mob enters your country and starts massacres, you may have no emotional resistance to intervening, according to your competence, and participating in a defense. This is not an action emanating from an ideology, but from a functional place. You defend your neighborhood, your village, your country in a practical way.
If a dog jumps up at my daughter’s throat, what I will do to the dog might seem cruel to some, but this is not the case; it is a functional action, with no psychological ramifications. I am not angry at the dog.
Upholding a fantasy about family, race, nation or the world is just entertaining concepts. Protecting our vegetation, our animal or human environment is a natural extension of our embodiment. When you hurt yourself or when you catch the flu, if your cells did not react aggressively, your body would disappear. You do not die because your cells resist powerfully. This apparent functional brutality does not need any intellectual justification.
Pretending to know what is right is violence. If a dog attacks, he is not wrong. He is not a bad dog. I am not offended by the fact that a dog wants to attack my daughter. Given his past, his training, I understand very well that sensing someone like my daughter, he attacks. He doesn’t have any other choice than to attack―and suffer the consequences.
Violence is the fear of your fears, of your emotions. Fear that you project onto the environment.
How to set ourselves free if we fall into the trap?
Through humility. See your fear clearly, with respect, without wanting to change it. Can I exist without fear? No, if it were possible we would know that. I carry this disturbance in myself, I make myself available to it. It is freedom, it is listening. Within this felt sense, a form of intelligence will reveal itself.
What frightens you reveals the fear that you carry. To realize that is extraordinary. What triggered your fear when you were four isn’t what triggers your fear today, but it’s still the same fear.
If a dog attacks you, you become terrified; if it attacks someone on his way back from the battlefield, you don’t care as much. Why? The situation doesn’t create fear, it only reveals it.
Your husband leaves you, you don’t know how to pay the rent, you feel yourself getting older, your country is at war, you fear for your child, for your mother… Everyone has something that triggers their fear, but it’s still the same fear.
When I realize that the situation, whatever it may be, awakens a fear that has always been present in me, I have taken the first step, I have become available. My attention focuses on the felt sense of fear, no longer on its apparent cause. I am going to let this feeling of fear live in me. I am not afraid, I feel the fear, and then clarification takes place.
As long as you are afraid of something, you are locked in a concept. You can try all you want to set yourself free, to train yourself, to control your fear of something, but something else will trigger it. Some people are scared to get mugged on the street. To get over this phobia, they practice martial arts intensively for twenty years. Then they no longer are afraid of being attacked, but they may be terrified at the thought that their wife might cheat on them
.
To prepare for fear is futile, you need to feel it.
After I have been attacked by a dog or distraught by the possibility that my wife might leave me, when I find myself at home or in the hospital that evening, the echo of fear is still very present. Clearly, without doing anything, I let this aftertaste of fear live in me. In this passive state, fear becomes active. It talks, I listen. In my availability, it will reveal itself somatically; there is nothing to think about.
When you are at that stage, a whole sensory world opens up to you. Sooner or later you reach a stage of listening which harmonizes everything. This requires a certain maturity.
Usually, when we are scared, we run away from fear, we try to think of something else, we get married, we divorce, we bring a child into the world or we meditate…and fear comes back!
Sooner or later, when you are afraid of something, you thank the situation for showing you that fear is still present in you. As long as you haven’t faced it, whether you know it or not, your actions and your thoughts will be blocked, crystallized by fear.
We’re no longer afraid of what scared us ten years ago. Some fifty-year-olds are afraid of becoming sixty; when they are sixty, they fear being seventy, and so on, but fundamentally, no one is afraid of how old they are in the present. Their fear is only of the future, and when that future becomes present, they’re no longer afraid.
We are only afraid of the future. It is what comes later that scares us, it is tomorrow. Observe the mechanism. In your presence, the word fear will evaporate. Fear is a thought; the future does not exist.
You are saying that fear is something which is inside of us, something which reveals itself through triggers and ghosts. This fear, which is present, is real; the objects of fear aren’t.
They are real but they are only triggers, that’s all.
But fear is really here?
Of course. And it’s a profound emotion, like all emotions. When you face fear and set it free from its environment of images, the fundamental fear, the causeless fear reveals itself and you are available to it. In your somatic availability, a new clarity blossoms.
The description stops here. What comes next is awe.
We need to allow the mystery to be. We can’t say how far we can go. The experience is indescribable. We can’t describe what it means to “let the fear live inside of us.” It doesn’t belong to the realm of expression.
When fear has left its imaginary cause, it is no longer fear. We can say the same for sadness, anxiety, loneliness; they are doorways to space.
The body, the psyche are crystallized emotions. When we set them free of images, they resonate with primordial emotions. Feel this: “I am not afraid; the fear is in me.” Have the experience.
If I cannot name it, it could be, instead of fear, just a sensation. It is as if I needed to cease to exist for the experience to happen. When I identify it as fear, it stops being pure. When I superimpose an image, when I paint it with this word “fear,” the sensation isn’t what it was when it first appeared. Is that it?
Yes. When you are really afraid, the word fear isn’t there. When you say, “I am scared,” “I am terrified,” “I am suffering,” you are thinking. The moment you feel the intensity of the experience, it doesn’t leave any space for the concept of fear, of suffering, of terror. The experience is much too strong to allow any verbal expression. The need to name and to own things is intense, but in action, there is no concept of experience.
Then suffering cannot be suffering if it stays pure?
Exactly, suffering is an image without substance.
Words are simply pointers. The word water does not quench your thirst; the word water evokes the perception of it. The words fear, sadness are all symbols. Since we agreed to play with language, we use certain representations, but symbols have their limits. You feel the image, it resonates in you; you forget the image, and the resonance stays. At that moment, the emotion no longer has a name.
But isn’t that true only for certain experiences, such as in an emergency? In day-to-day life, it seems that the intensity is not strong enough for me to be carried away by emotion, and thus identification comes right away.
Do not let existence become trivial. Become aware of the power of the moment.
There is nothing ordinary in life. When you touch a woman or a man, when you listen to the wind or to the car horns on the highway, everything is possible.
Life is nothing but intensity.
All our actions are rituals. What is a ritual? It is the awareness that there is no gratuitous act—that everything is gratuitous. Every conscious act celebrates the gratuitous quality of life. A bubbly, intense sensation of life reveals itself little by little. Even in an apparently banal and limited situation, deep life resonates and reveals itself.
The more the need to know, to own things, fades in you, the more you become aware that every instant of life is its climax. Going to India is not more alive than being in a neighborhood of Brooklyn or Montréal. The instant you pick up an apple, tie your shoelaces or brush your teeth, it is as beautiful, deep, and right as when you sit down to meditate. Every moment is the totality.
Some people meditate at a fixed hour, gather in a spiritual center. This is pathological. What is the best moment? Is it only at 3:30 AM? Which location could be more auspicious than my immediate environment?
Meditation is right here, now. What is sacred and profound is the present moment. Come back to this clarity; that’s what ritual is.
In India, life is very ritualized in order to clearly live the obvious quality of the ultimate that is present in every moment. With every meal, successive bites are offered to the five inner breaths, and so on.
No activity is tasteless. Eating, moving, thinking are cosmic actions. Every movement, every spark of our life is a climax. There is no ordinary life, profound life or spiritual life. It’s only fear that creates differences—the inferior, the superior, the spiritual, the material.
Come back to the obvious; each emotion is the essential.
In art, when you reach a certain creative level, you no longer furnish it with names. You no longer evoke notions of representation. Only proportions, gradations, movements remain, but there is no subject. The storyline of a painting showing a tree, a cathedral or an apple, completely disappears. What remains are masses of green, blue, red, forceful lines and spaces.
When we are afraid of someone, is it only because they disturb us?
What disturbs you in the presence of someone else is something you carry in yourself. You come into a room where thirty people are gathered. Twenty-nine of them do not bother you too much, but there is one whom you cannot stand. Why do you target this one person more than any other? Because they mirror something that you cannot abide in yourself and that you’re not aware of. Seeing that in the other is triggering.
We are always challenged by the pathology which is the closest to home. When you decide that a situation is unacceptable, it is because you don’t listen and you don’t understand.
There is nothing intolerable that you do not carry within yourself. This does not mean that you should stop yourself from reacting if it goes beyond your capacity to welcome it.
What is truly unbearable? The conviction that you know what is right. If you hear words that point to a different world vision than yours, you get offended. What’s offensive is the pretense of knowing. If you let go of all pretense, nothing is revolting, there is understanding. At the level of the body, it’s a different story, but to be psychologically disturbed by someone or something is a fantasy.
What is said here is not about creating a new attitude, but rather about being available to what’s here. That’s the only possibility. What is intolerable to you is something that, for the moment, you cannot acknowledge in yourself; so, you project it onto somebody else. Sooner or later you will see the mechanism.
Do not force yourself to accept things that exceed your capacity but rather, take advantage of the “intole
rable” situation; go home and give life to that residue, that intimate echo. Little by little, you will see that less and less things will be unpleasant, until nothing is unpleasant anymore.
Intolerable means that something disturbs your pretense system and challenges the world that you have created in defense of yourself and of your existence. If you meet a very rich man and say to him, “In reality, you have nothing,” he could be shocked by your remark because he has spent his life building the image of himself as a wealthy man. If you meet a homeless person and you tell him, “In reality, you have everything,” he could be hurt because he lives with this deep certainty that he has nothing, that he is unhappy.
We must live with reality. Acceptance replaces intolerance. When you no longer picture yourself as rich or poor, nothing is psychologically intolerable.
You think that a rapist or a murderer are abominable, and then one day you look, and you understand the inner functioning of the one who needs to rape, to kill and to create suffering in order to find a few moments of happiness. When you become aware of the distress, of the sadness, of the despair that is there, you no longer find it intolerable, you just understand what the right action is.
The intolerable is the defense of one’s world. It is the origin of fascism. Our most common attitude is to forbid what is intolerable to us.
Can you speak about victims?
To feel that you are a victim is a concept; it is still pretending. Some people indulge in this role. They are victims of society, of their parents, their body, their education, their poor pronunciation... It is a demand just like any other. To be proud is the other side of the same coin. Some are proud of their past, some are victims of it—to each their fantasies.